It’s Always Sunny in Reykjavik or How I NSA-Proofed My Email (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s Always Sunny in Reykjavik or How I NSA-Proofed My Email (2013)

#51

Post by yownie » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 10:47 PM UTC

darklajid wrote: post #18

My biggest gripe is not the server (I run my own), it's the client(s). Currently I use Trojita on the desktop and K-9 on my mobile. I never managed to get PGP to play with Trojita, so for signing/encrypting/decrypting I have Claws installed as well. Trojita often randomly hangs and needs to be killed. K-9 is functional, but is to mail what Gimp is to painting.. Mailpile (I'm a backer) might be interesting, but is sti…

Founders are good friends of mine here, rest assured the one on paternity leave will keep going with it once again. I have no doubt in my mind, he cares passionately about providing this service and software to the community.

Re: It’s Always Sunny in Reykjavik or How I NSA-Proofed My Email (2013)

#52

Post by yownie » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 10:53 PM UTC

cli_cowboy wrote: post #36

Most of the article is about his host in iceland. That can't be working out very well for him these days: https://www.greenqloud.com/greenqlouds-public-cloud-services... Thor is no more

Greenqloud as a VPS provider is no more Thor data centre run by Advania is still alive and well here. We also have a few more VPS providers like Orange, 1984, Icehost and Datacell.

Re: It’s Always Sunny in Reykjavik or How I NSA-Proofed My Email (2013)

#53

Post by echlebek » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

A former coworker of mine has made a lot of contributions to a project called sovereign: https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

> "Sovereign is a set of Ansible playbooks that you can use to build and maintain your own personal cloud based entirely on open source software, so you’re in control."

It makes use of all the techniques described in the article for e-mail, including dovecot/postfix, DKIM, encfs.

I decided to give it a try a few weeks ago. I went and bought a $10/month linode instance and a domain name. By the end of the day I could send and receive e-mail. letsencrypt was a big help here, because it allowed me to get TLS for free.

I always assumed that hosting your own e-mail was virtually impossible but my friend has been hosting his personal e-mail and the e-mail for his company for around two years now, with linode and sovereign. He says that the server requires maintenance about once every six months.

This doesn't really protect you from the three-letter orgs, as other commenters here have mentioned. But it does put you in control of your own data, and prevents analytics of your own inbox by corporations like google.